


The Guilty and the Dead

by NervousAsexual



Series: Whumptober 2020 [19]
Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Harm to Children, I'm not really happy with this one, Maybe I'll come back to it sometime, Non-Graphic Violence, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:12:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27107755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: It is 4E 185. A new prisoner comes to Cidhna Mine.
Series: Whumptober 2020 [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960987
Kudos: 2
Collections: NervousAsexual's Stephen Russell Skyrim Challenge, Whumptober 2020





	The Guilty and the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Whumptober prompt #19--Grief/Mourning a Loved One

The newest prisoner to Cidhna Mine didn't fight back the way most did. Urzoga gra-Shugurz had mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, it made her job easier. On the other, it was no fun to slap around someone who barely seemed to notice. He let her do whatever she wanted to him without complaint or reaction. Usually it took a few weeks on the inside to break somebody, but this one was dead already.

"Put these on," she told him, tossing him the standard tunic and footwraps. He made no move to catch them. For a moment after they fell he did nothing, but when she showed him her mace he wordlessly changed clothes. If he was embarrassed he didn't show it.

He hadn't yet finished pulling on the footwraps when she gave him a shove, sending him stumbling toward the entrance to the mine. He felt stiff as a board beneath her hand.

"Nice place, huh?" she said as she herded him down the corridor and toward the cell door. "Hope you like rocks and blacklung. 'Course that's just the way Markarth is, ain't it? Anyway, make yourself at home, because the only way you're getting out is in a box."

He didn't respond.

Shame, Urzoga thought. Silverblood had warned her that this one was a fighter. Only rarely was he so very wrong.

The mine echoed with the _thunk_ of tumblers turning in the cell lock. She ushered the prisoner forward, onto the platform that stretched the width of the mine. He made no move for the stairs on the far end. His eyes were fixed firmly on some spot near his feet.

"No need to cry about it. Look, all your Forsworn friends are here."

He raised his eyes and glanced at her out of the corner of his emotionless eyes.

"Welcome home," the orc guard told him, and her hand, firm on his back, tipped him forward off the platform.

* * *

He struck the rock hard, hard enough that for a moment all he could do was lay there, stunned. The men around the fire spared him the briefest of glances before returning to their evening gruel.

Slowly Braig pushed himself up on shaking arms. They gave out beneath him. He tried again, got to his knees this time, and dragged himself back, through the dirt, to the rock wall beneath the guard platform. Bright blood ran from his nose, and he wiped the worst of it onto the back of his arm. He gave no indication that he knew the others were there.

One of the others looked from the prisoner to the guard to cell door across from them, waiting, before finally shaking his head and climbing to his feet. He refilled his bowl as best he could from the almost-empty pot over the fire and brought it over to the prisoner.

"Here," he said, dropping it at the man's feet. "Eat up."

The man looked up at him for a moment. His red-rimmed eyes fixed again on the mine floor.

"What's the matter? Too good for it? Not gonna stoop so low you'll eat what the rest of us have to? You'll get over that in a hurry."

The man glanced at the bowl. Without a word he picked it up and offered it back to him. The reddened eyes closed. His head tipped back against the wall.

"Ah, that's how it is. You're not the first to think starvin' yourself is the easiest way out of Cidhna Mine. I gotta tell you, though, guards don't have any pity on that. You don't pull your weight, you get punished. Get punished enough and starved enough and you get sick. Get sick enough... they don't call healers." He took the bowl back. "At some point you either give up and eat like the rest of us, or you starve to death. And if it's death you're lookin' for, there's easier ways and lots of us to oblige." He took a shiv from his tunic and tossed it at the prisoner instead. "Here. That ought to do the job."

The prisoner's head shifted slightly, and his eyes opened enough to see the knife beside him. Raising his head, he laid a hand on it but moved no further.

"Go on. Nice straight slash down the inside of your arm."

He didn't move.

"Too much of a coward, huh? Well, you're in good company." He walked away, the bowl in his hands. "Welcome to the Forsworn."

* * *

He didn't dream because he didn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes he saw her face, the terror and pain and heartbreak, as the headsman's axe came down.

He'd begged them. Where they shoved him down on his knees he begged Hrolfdir to call it off. He would go without argument. He would walk into Cidhna Mine of his own free will if they just let her go. She was just a child, she didn't know what she was saying.

And what had she said? Nothing. She cried because she didn't want to see him go--and he didn't want to leave her; they were all either of them had after his wife died, gods only knew what would happen to her alone--and told them not to take her papa, she would go instead.

She was just a child. He wanted to scream it into the mine until his voice gave out. She didn't pose any threat to them.

He never let go of the shiv. If he had any courage at all he would have used it. If he had any courage he wouldn't have made it past the first guard. But he didn't have any courage. All he had was a vast, gnawing emptiness in his chest. He couldn't even cry.

"You ever swung a pick before?" the man who gave him the shiv asked.

He tossed a pickaxe to him and on reflex Braig caught it. He shook his head.

"Figures. Let's see your hands." Without waiting for a response he grabbed Braig by the wrist and turned his hand over to inspect the calluses worn there by years of farm work. "Isn't that a shame. Lots of calluses and all of 'em in the wrong spot. You're gonna be bleeding before noon-meal."

Braig found he didn't care. He worked wherever he was pointed and was grateful for the pain of it. He was slow and he was imprecise and putting his entire body into swinging the pick felt like the last few stumbling steps before his body falling apart forever, his lungs burned with dust and exertion, and he barely made a dent in the work that needed to be done. The other prisoner was right. By the time the guards tossed down the slop that was the noon meal the handle of his pick was drenched with blood.

"My advice, you'd better wrap those up," the man told him, nodding at his blood-slicked hands. "There's easier ways to die."

Despite the work he had done he had no appetite for anything. He sat beside the fire, hands on his legs and palms turned upward, in silence.

"Too good for us, huh?" another asked him. "Living with the nords make you weak?"

"He's taking the long way out." The first prisoner helped himself to Braig's portion. "Goes against his principles or something. Some people have those, Vuol." Beside him another prisoner, an orc, cleared his throat loudly. The man frowned but handed the bowl over. "That'll change. Never met a Nord or Reachman yet that could hold out 'til it's over."

"You ever kill a man, new blood?" Vuol grabbed him by the chin and forcefully turned him to face them. "Or are you in for picking old ladies' pockets and stealing septims from kids?"

Braig looked at him for a long moment. Vuol shifted uneasily and let him go. No one spoke, and Braig looked back at his bleeding hands.

"Neither," he said at last.

"Another innocent tossed in for no reason, eh?" the orc laughed. "Ain't we all, brother. Ain't we all."

He didn't know what was done with her body. He prayed that someone had brought it to the Hall of the Dead, but in his heart he knew that the executed didn't receive proper burial. If the guards were kind they would have let her body burn in the forge. If not they may just as well have rolled her into the river and let her drift away.

He staked his hope on cremation. It couldn't have been much trouble. She was so tiny. She would barely have disturbed the forge.

She was a child, he wanted to scream. She was just a child.

* * *

By day's end his hands were torn beyond recognition. He walked through the tunnels until he managed to find some imp stool and blisterwort and carried it back to the fire.

As he was crushing the ingredients in his bowl he became aware of eyes on him.

"What're you doing, new blood?" the orc asked.

"Healing salve." He stirred the mushrooms together with his hand. It already felt a little better.

"Yeah? You an alchemist?"

"No. My wife. Learned it from her."

"Hmm." The orc looked from him to the cell door across from the fire and back. "Better than nothing. Madanach ought to know about this."

_Madanach._

"Tell you what. I ain't brought him his dinner yet and somebody's gotta do it. Take your little... whatever it is... and bring it to him. Maybe he'll have some use for you after all."

His chest tightened up and he closed his hands into shaking fists. Braig took the bowl of slop and the orc guided him to the cell door.

"Don't try anything in there," the orc warned. "Otherwise you'll have more than just Madanach to answer to."

Braig barely heard him.

All he could focus on was the act of walking. Through the cell door. Down a short corridor. Past another cell door. Up to a small, dark room. He steeled and stepped inside, and there, before him, was the King in Rags.

Madanach sat at a makeshift writing table, perusing a book as if he were still the king of Markarth instead of a prisoner. For all the years he'd spent in Cidhna Mine he looked exactly as he had on the outside. His imprisonment seemed to have changed nothing.

He barely knew what was happening. He let the bowls, one filled with healing salve, the other with slop, fall to the ground. He took hold of the shiv he still carried at his side. He drove it into Madanach's back.

Except that he didn't make it that far. Without looking up from his work Madanach waved an arm dismissively in an arc that sent a wall of frosty air behind him and for the first time in a long time Braig remembered what it meant to be truly cold. All the strength went out of him. He sank down to one knee.

Madanach glanced back at him. "Ah, Braig. I wondered when you might join us."

Gods damn him. Braig struggled to stand and fell again. They'd spoken once, only once, and it had been the worst mistake he'd ever made.

Madanach stood and stretched, then strolled over to take the shiv from Braig's hand. His entire body seemed to radiate cold. "Finally grown sick of the nord boot on your throat?" He ran the shiv blade down the front of Braig's tunic. "Or did they turn on you as they turn on all of us, exactly as I warned you they would?"

"I should have killed you," Braig told him. His voice shook, and not just with the cold.

"Well, you certainly tried." Madanach drove the shiv into his side. Braig choked back a groan. "Let me guess. Seen in the company of Forsworn, convicted on little else. Am I close?"

"My Aethra is dead because of you."

Madanach looked at him thoughtfully, tapping a finger to his chin. "Aethra, Aethra, as if I should know that name..."

Braig closed his eyes and turned away rather than look at him anymore. "They murdered my daughter because of you!"

Madanach was silent.

"Gods damn you. She was seven. She was a child!"

The cold began to fade.

"Tell me," Madanach said quietly.

"Someone saw me talking to you. That was enough. Jarl's men came and she begged me not to leave her. She begged them. She was seven and she asked the Jarl to take her instead." He sank down, curled over the wound, arms wrapped tightly around himself. "And after they made me watch her go to the block they threw me in here anyway." Any anger was gone. He wept and wept for the first time in days.

For a moment Madanach said nothing. Then, with a sigh, he turned back to his table.

"Drink this," he said, tossing a red bottle to Braig. "Before you bleed to death on my floor." He waited for Braig to take the first swallow. "Aethra, you said was her name? This sort of thing should not happen. But it does. Every day, it seems like, to a hundred different families."

The potion tasted sour. Braig cried.

"This is what I meant when we spoke. The nords don't care if you are or aren't Forsworn. They will punish you just the same. I am sorry for your daughter. If I had known what would happen, perhaps I would have done it differently. But you must see that her blood is on the jarl's hands, not mine."

He was so tired. He could barely breathe.

"Do you think I enjoy watching my brethren die at nord hands? Of course not. I wish that I could have stayed in the redoubt and kept them alive. But even if I did that, you know that the nords would kill us anyway. If they want to treat me as an animal, so be it. I will be exactly what they expect of me, because at least this way I'm not trading my soul for temporary peace." Madanach watched him for a moment. "Your daughter should not have died, but the nords would never have seen her as an innocent child. They see only the guilty and the dead."

She was only a child.

"My original offer stands. There is a place for you in the Forsworn. We can't bring you child back, but we can help you take your revenge. Is that offering enough?"

He could see her still, kneeling in front of the block, and he tried to soothe her, tell her it would be okay. She raised her head to look at him, and he had to watch it roll from the block.

He nodded.

"Good man. Good man." Madanach's voice betrayed no emotion as he walked away. "We will talk more when you've had time to put yourself back together. I'll be waiting."


End file.
